Chapter 7 examines how international patient movements, inspired by organizations in the USA and Western Europe, have come to see ‘de-regulation’ as a way to accelerate the translation of science into marketable medical products. But in research abroad and an international meeting hosted in the UK, conversations with international patient organisation (health organisation) representatives for Muscular Dystrophy (MD) and Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) and patients from Asia, Europe and the USA shed different light on this. Discussions show that, in a world characterized by regulatory capitalism and inequality among countries, ‘de-regulation’ cannot ‘save’ patients through increased access to experimental medicine in the same way. For, the performance of regulation in a country is contingent upon the material and organisational resources available to health organisations and the population in general in a juridical mandate. The politics of redemptive regulation in international health movements risks reconfiguring healthcare developments by a misrecognition of actual patient needs and local practices. This chapter further raises questions about the potential benefits and costs of regenerative medicine to various patient groups in societies with different standards of wealth, welfare and political governance.

Introductory and regulatory capitalism, and it outlines the methodology and the chapters. On the basis of a discussion of the notion of ‘regulatory violence’ in the context of various relevant legal, political, philosophical and criminological literatures on regulation and violence, I propose to define regulatory violence as the forseeable and possibly preventable violence that obtains when regulation is created and applied for reasons that are illegitimate. In the field of regenerative medicine, this means that when research regulation is developed for reasons other than patient safety and scientific development, it is likely to cause foreseeable harm to patients, the development of science and the public at large. Although in a world dominated by regulatory capitalism, regulatory competition is a main driver of regulatory adjustments, regulatory violence is not unavoidable: some countries manage to change regulation by prioritising patient needs and high-quality science. The Chapter also discusses the challenges involved in regulating the safety and scientific quality of clinical research and the marketing of new regenerative therapies and the main arguments for moving from ‘competitive desire’ to ‘caring solidarity’.